Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

Apparently, people in Azeroth behave a lot like they behave in the real world. That's why the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in World of Warcraft is so interesting to researchers. In 2005, a monster named Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi Trolls (what was his mother thinking?) infected a player with a spell called Corrupted Blood, which both drains characters of life, and is highly contagious. The idea was to weaken and ultimately kill everyone fighting in the dungeon. After someone was infected and teleported to the populous over-world, however, the disease went nova and a pandemic ensued. Try as they might, Blizzard couldn't quite stop the plague, and characters were wiped out on a massive scale. Players went into a strange and interesting survivalist mode.

lol.

The best part was when it was intentionally spread.

It was an interesting event, to say the least.

Survival meant staying away from Ironforge and any flight path, also logging off until Blizzard fixed it.

3. "You tell Stockholm I'm coming, and the Twisting Nether's comin' with me!"Following the release of its fourth expansion pack, World of Warcraft's subscriber base climbed over the 10 million mark. Earlier this year, the game "only" had 9.1 million subscribers. At its peak, it had 12 million paying customers, and today holds the Guinness World Record for most subscribers to a massively multiplayer online role playing game. Its present numbers place Azeroth's population on par with Sweden, so they had better watch themselves.

And probably at least 6 million of those are bots and Chinese gold farmers.

12. World of Warcraft by the numbers.According to MMORPG Realm, it took 150 developers four years to write the game's 5.5 million lines of code; create its 30,000 items; design and build its 1400 locations; plan and implement its 7600 missions; and give life to 5300 non-player characters.

And it takes 2 Blizzard graphic designers about 15 minutes to create one crappy looking tier set and another 5 minutes to save a few different colored variations of the same set as blue gear drops for heroics.

/it's no secret that the best looking gear in the game STILL dates back to vanilla//lich king had the worst looking gear, cata wasn't much better

theurge14:And it takes 2 Blizzard graphic designers about 15 minutes to create one crappy looking tier set and another 5 minutes to save a few different colored variations of the same set as blue gear drops for heroics.

/it's no secret that the best looking gear in the game STILL dates back to vanilla//lich king had the worst looking gear, cata wasn't much better

I don't know about Cataclysm since I stopped playing at the end of Wrath, but I personally thought Tier 10 was the best looking Tier. They really borked it with tier 9 though.

But from what I've seen of Cata and Mists both look pretty bland. Not like it matters though, since everybody just uses that armor thing to wear older tiers for male toons and slut wear for female toons.

Meh. I'd rather look at an MMO full of dudes playing as skimpy girls, than these guys trying to recreate their real life self. Wouldn't you rather have a game full of scantily clad virtual-women than a game full of fat-pimple-y basement dwelling mommas boys(all wow players are this =P)?

I always wonder if anybody famous plays my favorite addiction (Team Fortress 2). Closest I know of is Notch (creator of Minecraft). The developers even gave him a one of a kind hat (even though he wouldn't put Minecraft on Steam).

Meh. I'd rather look at an MMO full of dudes playing as skimpy girls, than these guys trying to recreate their real life self. Wouldn't you rather have a game full of scantily clad virtual-women than a game full of fat-pimple-y basement dwelling mommas boys(all wow players are this =P)?

I play horde so there's no recreating real life selves with orcs and trolls and...

I always wonder if anybody famous plays my favorite addiction (Team Fortress 2). Closest I know of is Notch (creator of Minecraft). The developers even gave him a one of a kind hat (even though he wouldn't put Minecraft on Steam).

So Yao Ming is having to resort to gold farming since the NBA money ran out. Ni hao, indeed.

no offense, but that guy that died from only playing 23 hrs was weaksauce. there are all kinds of jobs/projects that can require 24 hrs of attention to something, so i don't feel bad that this guy couldn't hack playing a computer game. my guess is there were some kind of preexisting conditions to make this happen, and then somebody just blamed WoW because it was the easiest thing to do.

What kind of hardware are we talking about? It's always changing, obviously, but Data Center Knowledge, a trade journal that covers such things, reported that as of 2009, World of Warcraft required 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cores, 112.5 terabytes of memory, and 1.2 petabytes of storage.

Interesting. From a geek standpoint, I'd be curious as to why they still have the need to do weekly maintenance, or at least not have some sort of a/b setup.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.(2) Yeah, he's an old guy but arguably the most famous person to play WoW is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken

he plays a Moonkin in PvP no less.

So can we get beyond this wow=teenage makes BS. I know it sells page views but it's flat out wrong.

kab:What kind of hardware are we talking about? It's always changing, obviously, but Data Center Knowledge, a trade journal that covers such things, reported that as of 2009, World of Warcraft required 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cores, 112.5 terabytes of memory, and 1.2 petabytes of storage.

Interesting. From a geek standpoint, I'd be curious as to why they still have the need to do weekly maintenance, or at least not have some sort of a/b setup.

A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

tgambitg:A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

kab:tgambitg: A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

Makes sense.... thanks for that!

I dabbled a bit in DBA before settling on the network side of things... While I'm competent at DBA, I hate it. So I understand why they do maintenance.

#13 I've been using this handle more or less continuously in various contexts since 1986 so It is NOT based o the name of the innkeeper in Bouldercrag Refuge, though I DO have to admit that he bears some resemblance to me in real life, making me wonder who I know who works for Blizzard

kab:tgambitg: A couple of things... for an a/b setup, for failover when doing maintenance, You;'d need twice as many servers. Plus, all the servers update in real time, so you'd have to be constantly adding data to the down servers databases. If you didn't want to do that, you'd need some downtime to copy the data over, you can't do that in real-time while the servers are back up, because the data is constantly changing. Databases (WoW is just a complex XML database) need downtime to compact and correct any errors in the data that creep in. Also, sometimes the servers just need to be rebooted. There is a lot of data flowing through the memory of the blades, and you need a hard reset every once in a while. With the size and complexity of the WoW databases and servers, it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take them down and do the maintenance that way.

Makes sense.... thanks for that!

On the plus side, they have gotten remarkably faster at doing the maintenance over the years. Back in Vanilla, the servers would all go down at the same time, for at least 4 hours. I remember one rather torturous session where the server all my main toons were on was down for 14 hours, and since I was unemployed at the time I was bored out of my skull. Now, they rotate the server maintenance so there's usually a few realms up during the maintenance period, and it's been a long time since I've seen them go down for maintenance for more than 30 minutes.

(1) The majority of players in the game are females 25-45. Blizzard has talked about that in the past and outside research has confirmed it.(2) Yeah, he's an old guy but arguably the most famous person to play WoW is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Walken

he plays a Moonkin in PvP no less.

So can we get beyond this wow=teenage makes BS. I know it sells page views but it's flat out wrong.

I don't think that the wiki entry about Walken is too accurate. I've read in multiple articles that Christoper Walken is a Technophobe and doesn't even own a PC.